


Feet on the ground

by Icie



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, Food, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-29
Updated: 2019-03-29
Packaged: 2019-12-26 05:17:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,271
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18276557
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Icie/pseuds/Icie





	Feet on the ground

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lostlenore](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lostlenore/gifts).



Running away should have been easy, Shigeru thinks, putting some muscle into shifting a rock. Running away should have been the simplest thing imaginable. He grunts as he deposits the rock to one side. No one is looking for him—who the hell would even notice?—and no one is looking for the tiny craft he took off in, because it was supposed to be destroyed (by him) two years ago.

He flops to the ground in a heap as his rugged companion returns. It's disgusting how he managed to stay ripped on a space station.

"Here," Kyoutani grunts, tossing something that's—

Yahaba yelps. "The fuck is this?' he asks. It's feathered and slimy and he thinks oozing?

Kyoutani's lip twitches into what Shijeru would think was a smile, apart from Kyoutani doesn't do smiles. He does grunts, grumbles, glares and frowns—nothing that would make him a good companion for, oh, say, travelling across space for months in a tiny ship. Just an off the wall example. Not that they're going far right now.

"Its a sloppird," Kyoutani says, grabbing the dead thing up by what could be—at a stretch—its mouth. "You just…" He does something with his fingers in its mouth-beak-thing and pulls it so that it splits into two pieces running down to its tail.

"That's disgusting," Shigeru says. 

Kyoutani shrugs. "Stay hungry then." His mouth tilts into a smirk (still not a smile.) "Or eat the ration bars."

Shigeru balks. Then, carefully, so that it doesn't get any ideas, takes one half of the sloppird from Kyoutani. Death would be better than ration bars. He stares the unappetizing dead thing down. "What do I…" He trails off.

Kyoutani rolls his eyes, then raises the bisected animal above his head and dangles it, tail first, into his mouth. His teeth tear off the last portion, he chews and swallows.

Shigeru grimaces. "I don't need to wash it, first?"

"The slime," Kyoutani says. "It handles that."

Great. Of course. The slime.

Suppressing a shudder, Shigeru mimicks Kyoutani in severing the tail with his teeth.

"It's good?" he says, surprised.

Kyoutani snorts. "You've never been on a planet before, have you?"

Shigeru stiffens. He hasn't, and he figures that's pretty obvious, but Kyoutani could try to be tactful. "And I suppose you have?" Shigeru returns. He shouldn't get defensive, he knows that, but he knows the reputation station kids have. Station kids are supposed to be sheltered brats who can't handle life outside artificial gravity, and he's irritated that he's falling right into the stereotype.

"Grew up here," Kyoutani says, picking off more pieces of the animal. The slimy feathers of its body begin to form a pile as Kyoutani plucks them with swift tugs close to the skin. Shigeru tries to mimick him, and only succeeds in coating his fingers in slime.

"I don't believe you," Shigeru snaps, though he's lying.

Kyoutani shrugs. "Doesn't matter, it's true."

Shigeru groans. "I know." He hates this. "Sorry."

Kyoutani shrugs again. "I already knew you were an asshole."

Shigeru's half of the sloppird hits Kyoutani's face. "Then why did you come with me?" he snaps. The sloppird peels off from Kyoutani's forehead, then cheek, and into his hand where he catches it, and goes about adding its feathers to the pile. He looks as happy as Shigeru's ever seen him.

"Figured you'd get killed if I didn't," Kyoutani says as if it's obvious.

"I'm not an idiot."

Kyoutani barks a laugh. "That right?"

"Yeah, it is." He suppresses the urge to mention the certificate he earned for getting into the top ten percent in their year for mathematics two years ago.

"You're not bad with a ship," Kyoutani says, which somehow makes Shigeru more angry, and not less.

"It's my job," he snaps.

"You could be shit at it," Kyoutani points out. Which is true. He's known plenty of people who are shit at their jobs.

Kyoutani passes across Shigeru's now featherless half of the sloppird. Shigeru takes it. He should try not to be stupid, at least for a moment.

They eat in silence. Kyoutani doesn't offer any more information about his past, and Shigeru doesn't ask. Shigeru doesn't offer any information about his motivations for up and leaving their life on the station, and Kyoutani doesn't ask. They don't ask each other a lot of things.

Shigeru spends three days up to his elbows in the ship's engine. Actual days, too. He's never considered how it feels to be on ground that spins in its path around a star that is constantly pulling it towards itself. He's not sure that he likes it, but he supposes he'll get used to it now that he's left the station behind.

"Close to done?" Kyoutani asks.

Shigeru extracts himself from the engine enough to squint down at him. "How could you tell?" This is the first time Kyoutani has asked about his progress. He's spent his time hunting and creating increasingly ridiculous meals for the two of them to eat. None of them have made him sick, and Kyoutani has explained that most of the flora and fauna on the planet were introduced by humans for the purposes of food, but Shigeru can't help thinking that none of it can be safe when it hasn't been created in a nice, clean, controlled station environment.

Kyoutani is holding bowls of the latest item on the menu. Yahaba steps down and towels off his hands, getting under the nails before shoving them into the decontamination units.

The latest meal is, for lack of a better word, _pretty_. Slices of something that looks like the vegetable version of a cheese ("Lotus," Kyoutani says when Shigeru inspects it too closely) floats in some kind of broth. 

"I should be finished by tomorrow," Shigeru explains, and Kyoutani nods.

There hadn't been anything in the engine that would have caused problems in the next twenty trips, all going well. But when the consequence of all _not_ going well would be the two of them being stretched to the width of noodles as time and space begin to blur without the protection of the ship to keep all the pieces in the right place, well, Shigeru had wanted to clear the warnings while he could. Kyoutani had agreed without protest, to Shigeru's surprise.

"So," Shigeru says, settling down to eat. "I can leave, once this is done."

Kyoutani grunts.

He hates asking. He hates having to do this. He hates that he can't expect Kyoutani to just _know_ what he means. Because he doesn't know whether Kyoutani will be coming with him. The guy seems perfectly okay on the planet, with its dirt and its insects and its sunshine and its wind and all of the other things that make Shigeru's skin crawl, and why should he give that up for more time spent in close quarters with Shigeru, where they'll step on each other's toes and fight and piss each other off. It wouldn't make sense for him to leave the ground, which he _likes_ for that.

Shigeru delays asking, drinking down the broth until he doesn't have any distractions left.

Kyoutani speaks before he can get up the nerve, which is sorta rude of him. "Packing everything up will take a while," he says. "We should stay another week so I can get us some better food for the next bit."

Really sorta rude of him to _assume_ he can come along, too.

Yahaba would call him out for it, but he'll take the high road. It's not like he'll mind spending more time with Kyoutani.


End file.
